Sydney Lea

 What has long attracted me to the natural world is not any capacity I might have to experience a Wordsworthian interfusion of its “soul” with mine than that –for all the inroads of science– it retains its otherness from me. There are poets, it seems to me, who regard Nature as somehow a storehouse of metaphors that may help them along; I am not immune from such a delusive temptation, but –given where and how I live, rather deep in the woods of upper New England– almost any hike into the landscape will provide some reminder that I am a guest, not an agent, spiritual, poetic, metaphorical, what have you. It is salutary, I believe, to encounter zoological, botanical, or geological realms that defy our yens to submit them to whatever artificial schemes we may surmise.